On this night of the full moon, Mountain Media
takes pleasure in re-distributing this classic "Vin"
column from 1992.

Halloween approaches, the day when many an American parent
will suit up the little ones in black robes, matching 17th
century conical hats, and oversized warty noses, sending them off
to delight the neighbors with this impersonation of a witch, as
traditionally represented from 17th century Austrian paintings of
the Hexensabbat right up through Disney's "Snow White.

Even the newspapers generally play along, running the results
of polls that ask Americans how many actually believe in such
mythological creatures as ghosts, trolls and witches.

But witches are not mythological creatures, of course. They
were the very real practitioners of a religion which pre-dated
Christianity in Europe, and which had coexisted quite peaceably
with the new Christian church for more than 1,000 years, from the
Council of Nicaea until the fateful year 1484 A.D., under the
quite sensible rule of the Canon Episcopi, which instructed
Christian clerics through all those years that -- in cases where
sorcery or commerce with the devil was charged but could not be
proven -- it was the accuser, not the accused, who was to suffer
the penalty for those crimes.

Needless to say, this held false charges to a minimum.

All that changed after 1484, when an ambitious but ethically
challenged Dominican friar and embezzler by the name of Heinrich
Kramer managed to convince Pope Innocent VIII to set the Holy
Office of the Inquisition onto the witches, using torture to
extract confessions, authorizing anonymous accusations without
any right for the accused to face her accuser, and granting the
soon-busy witch-hunters the rights to seize and divide the
estates of the accused (who were always found guilty), an
invitation to systematic legal looting so foul that it was never
allowed again in Western history ... until our current War on
Drugs, of course.

Millions of persons -- some doubtless practitioners of the Old
Craft, but many, especially in later years, just as doubtless
falsely accused -- were burned or hanged before the burning times
faded away with a kind of embarrassed shrug in the early 1700s.

The crime of which they were accused? Worshipping a female
deity, a goddess of the earth, and her male consort, the
goat-horned male god of fertility.

Christian clerics, themselves mostly illiterate, called this
female deity "the abomination," which has subsequently
been interpreted to mean the horned devil of Hebrew tradition.
But practitioners of a fertility cult would have had little
reason to mock the late-comer Christianity by hanging crosses
upside down or reciting masses backwards. "Satanism,"
to the extent that it ever existed (and I suspect more black
masses were chanted on London film sets in the 1960s and '70s
than anywhere in the four centuries preceding), is a very
different thing.

Why should we care about the fate of the witches? For
starters, it appears the witches stressed not the superiority of
either sex over the other, but rather a balance between male and
female principles -- an obvious notion for early agriculturalists
trying to come to a metaphorical understanding of the germination
of crops in the "mother" earth thanks to the
intervention of those primeval "male" agencies, the sun
and the rain.

But the culture which destroyed the witches was not merely
male-dominated. The history of our European ancestors of the 16th
and 17th centuries presents a spectacle of bloodthirsty
intolerance, a perverse catalogue of self-flagellation and
repulsion at sexuality which found outlet only in the frenzied
drive to subjugate and enslave both the natural world and any
other culture that presented itself. No matter how we may
celebrate their competitive superiority from a safe distance,
this was clearly a bunch of sick puppies.

Was it the plagues, which quite often left the continent
literally in the hands of teenagers? Whatever the reason, using
their superior technology of sail and cannon, and helped mightily
by bacteriological allies to which they had developed at least
partial immunity, the Europeans didn't merely conquer the
indigenous populations of the Americas, they ruthlessly
eradicated whole cultures, and with them any medical or other
knowledge they might have had to offer, sweeping all aside as the
"spawn of the devil."

Meantime, European women were being stripped of their property
and other rights (many "witches," curiously, were
widows of independent means), at precisely the time when their
presense in the councils of church and state might have
maintained some semblance of sanity.

The Europeans of the time adopted little of our hypocritical
modern-day pretense of being horrified at "drug use"
per se -- they happily imported coffee, tobacco, opium, and
cocaine. In fact, they forced the opium trade on China when it
proved to be the only thing for which the Chinese would trade
silver bullion.

But while they reveled in novel forms of drunkenness, what did
horrify those brave conquerors was the use of any hallucinogenic
substance as a means to religious revelation, a superstitious
dread of alternative paths to spiritual enlightenment which still
hangs on in our aforementioned and thoroughly irrational
"War on Drugs."

(Which drug is involved in more incidents of spouse battery
and inter-family murder by a factor of millions-to-1: alcohol or
LSD? Which will get you 20 years in the federal pen, while the
other now comes in convenient "wide-mouth 12-packs"?)

The wholesale eradication of the cultures of the Aztecs and
the Incas was justified not because of their practice of slavery
and ritual slaughter -- Pizarro and Cortes would have found those
familiar enough -- but because they were found to be using
peyotl, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and ololiuhqui (a variety of
morning glory seed) in their religious rituals, sure signs of
"witchcraft," and coincidentally a method of seeking
direct revelations from the gods which really delivered the goods
-- hardly fair competition for the modest little Spanish
communion wafer.

Why did the conquistadors relate such practices to the witches
back home? Because the witches, too, in a triumph of empirical
science (Northern Europe has no reliably safe natural
hallucinogens), had found ways to turn such normally deadly
poisons as henbane, monkshood, and belladonna into an
externally-applied ointment which would promote religious
revelation by inducing a sensation of flying, followed by
ecstatic visions.

(The stuff worked best when applied to the mucous membranes
with a smooth wooden rod or staff -- the "witch's
broomstick" of our modern Halloween.)

This was the great evil of the witches, and the justification
for destroying millennia of the "materia medica" which
they had gathered -- the traditional folk knowledge of medicinal
plants which was largely destroyed with the Wise Women of 16th
and 17th century Europe, and which we are only painfully piecing
together again today.

It's commonly held that this order of midwives and herbal
healers were a superstitious lot, rejecting the more
"scientific" advances of the academically trained
doctors of their time. The truth is just the opposite. What could
be more scientific than\par carefully observing and noting the
effects of medicinal herbs over a period of generations? What
could be a more superstitious pile of nonsense than the theories
of the 2nd century quack Galen, whose theory that health is
dominated by the "four humours" remained gospel for
centuries, refined with the addition of harsh purgatives and the
exquisite nonsense of blood-letting?

So fatal was the standard practice of medicine in the
centuries after the witches were eliminated that most leading
statesmen of the time -- George Washington included -- died while
being bled by doctors. (Washington woke up with a sore throat at
the age of 67, and died within 48 hours after receiving a
cathartic enema, being dosed with poisonous mercury and antimony,
and having literally half his blood -- four pints -- drained from
his body, all in keeping with the best medical advice of the
day.)

All three of Louis XVI's elder brothers were killed by the
blood-letting of physicians during youthful illnesses. The last
direct heir to the Bourbon throne was preserved only after the
queen mother bundled him away to a locked room and refused on
pain of death to let any of the court physicians have at him.

Superstition? Ask most modern patients whether they would
rather be injected with a purified white extract, or swallow a
tea made from the same herb, and see whether there isn't a
"superstitious" preference for the power of the magic
syringe or even for surgery over the remedy in its
naturally-occurring form, even when the latter offers better
control of dosage and side effects. Chew up a bunch of bug-eaten
leaves? How primitive!

The ancient Egyptians were fighting infection with fruit molds
as early as the date of the Ebers papyrus, but thousands had to
die of pneumonia, puerperal fever and meningitis, all through the
late Middle Ages and right through the 19th century, before
Fleming could get anyone to take another look at penicillin. It
was with similar reluctance -- and not until 1795, when Napoleon
seemed likely to put them all out of business unless they got
practical in a hurry -- that the established brotherhood of
"scientific" physicians finally acknowledged that the
"old wives' remedy," lemon juice, was a better cure for
naval scurvy than all their acids and caustic salts put together.

This is the tradition of ignorance, intolerance, and futility
which we honor when we dress up our children to ridicule warty
old witches, or when we protest (as parents groups in Le Mesa,
Calif. and elsewhere continue to do every year) that Roald Dahls'
book "The Witches" should be banned from school
libraries because it "portrays witches as ordinary-looking
women."

Only the dimming effects of time -- and the fact that the
Inquisition pretty much got them all -- render this outrage
acceptable. To find a modern parallel, imagine the (fully
appropriate) public outcry if it were discovered that some small
town in Bavaria, from which for some undisclosed reason all the
Jewish families disappeared in 1942, had since decided to launch
a new Halloween custom, in which many of the town's blonde-haired
little children were dressed up in yarmulkes and artificially
large beaked noses, and sent out to play pranks and demand loot
under the guise of being "nasty little Jews." Imagine
further that the more religious local townfolk demanded the
removal of certain children's books from the local library,
because they depicted Jews as "people of ordinary human
appearance."

A healthy skepticism about many of our modern-day
"witches" and some of their New Age mumbo jumbo may be
in order ... though surely it's not up to us to choose which of
their exotic notions it's "acceptable" to explore.

But shall we extend our inherited intolerance to the many
serious researchers now trying to rediscover the healing
properties of plants, to overcome centuries of medical libel
designed to convince us that mild-mannered natural remedies which
can take weeks to rebuild our immunities are not worth our time,
that the only valuable medicines are purified (and thus
patentable) toxins that kill "bad" cells in a test
tube, no matter how much damage they cause the "host
organism" in the process?

Excepting the odd mountain hamlet in Gwynedd, the Tirol, and
the Hebrides, our direct links to the Wise Women of old are
probably lost for good. But rediscovering their worldview, a
beneficent vision of humankind inextricably balanced in nature's
mandala, is a journey well worth beginning anew -- perhaps even
on the night of the Samhain moon.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor
of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and editor of the monthly
Financial Privacy Report (subscribe by calling Nathanael at
612-895-8757.) His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays
on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing
1-800-244-2224; or via web site: Vin's Book